1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a hardware simulator for a transaction processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
As financial and other commercial institutions become increasingly automated, they continually wish to develop both in-house computer applications and customer related applications. This automation often depends on acquiring newly developed hardware, and it is critical for gaining a competitive advantage that institutions are able to select between different hardware suppliers.
Without the ability to write vendor independent applications, financial institutions would be forced to adapt their ATM applications if they change ATM vendors; similarly supermarket chains would be forced to adapt their applications if they changed till vendors. This increases application development time and costs and restricts the freedom of the institutions to choose between vendors.
WOSA/XFS (Windows Open Services Architecture for Extended Financial Services) is an emerging standard enabling financial institutions, whose branch and office solutions run on the Windows NT platform, to develop applications independent of vendor equipment.
FIG. 1 shows the standard WOSA model. Using this model, an application 10 communicates hardware requests 12 to various hardware devices in, for example, an ATM 14 via a WOSA manager 20. The application issues transaction requests 12 which are hardware independent, and thus vendor independent. The requests are queued by the WOSA manager 20 which manages concurrent access to the ATM hardware 14 from any number of applications 10.
When a piece of hardware is installed on the ATM, it registers its controlling software, known as a service provider module (SPM) 30, with the WOSA manager by using, for example, the Windows registry. The WOSA manager 20 is thus able to relay a hardware request 12 to an appropriate SPM 30, using the Windows registry as a look-up table. The SPM 30 takes relayed hardware independent requests 16 from the WOSA manager and actuates the appropriate piece of hardware to process the requests. The results of a request can be returned by an SPM 30 synchronously via the WOSA manager 20 or asynchronously by generating a Windows event.
One of the problems associated with developing applications for financial devices such as Automated Teller Machines, kiosks or supermarket tills, is that multiple developers need access to expensive hardware for long periods of the development cycle. This can be inconvenient as users must copy development code and platforms to machines in different locations, for example a laboratory, plus there are inevitable conflicts over access to hardware as deadlines approach.